Amazon is taking its physical retail ambitions and grocery store technology overseas, opening an Amazon Fresh store in the United Kingdom on Thursday. The store will be Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar retail operation outside of the United States.
The 2,500-square-foot Amazon Fresh, in the Ealing area of London, will employ the “Just Walk Out” technology that has previously only been used in Amazon Go convenience stores in the U.S. That high-tech experience involves an array of cameras and sensors to log what people put in their carts as they shop, eliminating checkout lines.
There are 26 Amazon Go stores spread across Seattle, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and two Go Grocery locations located in Seattle and Redmond, Wash.
The first Amazon Fresh grocery store opened last August in Woodland Hills, Calif., and the company recently announced that two new Fresh stores are coming to Seattle’s Central District and the Factoria neighborhood of Bellevue, Wash.
With the opening of the London store, Amazon is also announcing the launch of a new private food brand called “by Amazon” in the U.K. The range of hot food and on-the-go items will be sold only at the Fresh store.
Groceries are an estimated $678 billion U.S. market. The Amazon Fresh brand originated in Seattle with the first pilot of the company’s grocery delivery service starting in 2007, and Amazon continues to invest heavily in both physical and online grocery. It acquired Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion in 2017 and operates nearly 500 of those stores in the U.S.
